Talk:Ancient Celtic music

problems with intro

This is a very valuable and welcome article, with lots of primary sources. A certain amount of it strikes me as original research (so strictly defined here at Wikipedia), but I myself don't find that troubling. There are, however, some problems. And I note with some amusement that it was imported wholesale from Citizendium; so much for claims that Citizendium is superior because "approved by editors."

I deleted the following from the intro:

"The ancient Celts had a distinct culture, which is shown by their very sophisticated art work. The Hallstatt culture and especially the later La Tène culture are characterized by a high aesthetic level, which must have also left traces in Celtic music and musical practices. Music will surely have been an integral part of this ancient cross-European culture, but with only very few exceptions its characteristics have been lost to us."

OK, agreed, but the article on Gregorian chant doesn't begin with a history of the Catholic Church; that's reinventing the wheel. We have articles on that. The "surely" is problematic; why "surely"? Evidence or not? How 'bout we just skip the special pleading and cut to the chase? I mean, I assume that Celtic architecture (in wood and so mostly unrecoverable) was more beautiful than reconstructions show, because of their love of personal adornment and general aesthetic sense; but I don't have any proof of that.

On the other hand, we don't even get a sentence identifying who the ancient (continental) Celts were, what the geographic distribution was, their ethno-linguistic identity.

Then we get a long dense paragraph of snippets from the ancient sources. Great material; but not an introduction. If Cicero's statement is unrepresentative or false, why start out with it? (The tirade against Cicero seems also like a distraction this early in the article, and introduces its own polemic note; the remark on Cicero's characterization of Judaism doesn't belong in article on ancient Celtic music, because it assumes that a Roman's attitude toward the inhabitants of Britain, about whom Cicero knew extremely little, is shaped by his attitudes toward Jews, who were a significant minority population in the city of Rome and had longstanding relations with Rome.)

Most of this material in the second paragraph is interesting but proves nothing. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean in regard to Celtic music:

"musical education must have widely gained ground in Gaul, otherwise Julius Sacrovir couldn't have used the erudite Gauls as a decoy, after Sacrovir and Iulius Florus had occupied the city of Augustodonum during the Gallic insurrection in 21 AD."

I'm assuming these erudite Gauls (which were nothing new even at the time of Julius Caesar) were playing music? Also, if they had received by the time of Sacrovir a musical education in the Roman manner, as seems to be implied, it says nothing about ancient Celtic music. By the same token, Vindex's reproach to Nero shows him to be a critic of the Greco-Roman music tradition; it again says nothing about the Celtic tradition (for which Frederick Ahl found textual evidence of polyphony). The same is true of Maximinus Thrax in reverse; his inability to appreciate a Roman stage show says nothing about Celtic music — especially since he was of Thracian and Gothic descent. Throughout this article, Celts and Germanic peoples are indiscriminately cross-identified; singing Germans are adduced as examples of ancient Celtic music. We even get the phrase "Germanic Celts"; now, Caesar himself identified some Belgic peoples as kinda Celtic, kinda German, but the phrase is treated as unproblematic here.

The carnyx material is very good, but doesn't even link to the existing article on carnyx (though I've fixed that). Loved the external link to carnyx music! And I look forward to exploring many primary sources I hadn't known offered glimpses into Celtic music. My main recommendation is that the introduction be rewritten in accordance with Wiki principles. Cynwolfe (talk) 20:48, 23 June 2009 (UTC)

The article clearly has {{essay-entry}} issues. I am not going to template it, as at least it is an essay by someone who knows what he is talking about, but it will need some work on the details to complete the transition from Citizendium to Wikipedia. Also, what's with all the "noinclude" markup, is that a result of the copy-paste from citizendium as well? --dab (𒁳) 12:09, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

Graeco-Roman-Jewish practice since Phoenician times

To comment on the issue which brought me here, "the common Graeco-Roman-Jewish practice of identifying Iuppiter and Zeus as Yahweh and vice versa since Phoenician times", this could do with a little bit of specification. What are "Phoenician times"? 1000 BC? At that time there were neither Greeks nor Romans nor Jews, at least none who left any records for us to comment on their combined Graeco-Roman-Jewish practice. I doubt there could have been any "Graeco-Roman-Jewish" syncretism at all prior to the Hellenistic era, which I wouldn't quite equate with "Phoenician times". And if there has been such a "Graeco-Roman-Jewish practice" in the 4th, or 3rd, or 2nd century BC, it would (a) be interesting to see a reference for it, and (b) worth pointing out that since the 4th century BC, there was no "Yahweh" in Judaism, because of the taboo that developed in Second Temple Judaism: there was only HaShem/Adonai. --dab (𒁳) 12:13, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

This article is riddled with problems, as I said above. One might wonder why this subject matter is at issue in an article on ancient Celtic music in the first place. The word "Phoenician" should always give a sane person pause. I confess that I've glanced back at this article a couple of times without doing anything of substance to improve it, because the research would take me pretty far afield from the things I'm looking at now. And while obviously the evidence for ancient Celtic music is extremely limited, I would enjoy seeing a decent article on the subject. I mentioned above that Frederick Ahl (in an article I read a long time ago) points to a couple of Greek or Roman literary passages that suggest Celtic music sounded strange to these hearers because it was polyphonous. There's some archaeological evidence for instruments, and art historical evidence that both depicts instruments and suggests social context. The literary evidence also indicates something of the role of Celtic music in society. So I reiterate my wish-list — which may seem unresponsive to the point Dbachmann makes, except that I don't see what it has to do with Celtic music, so if it's problematic, I say just cut it out. I think I probably moved that bit about Cicero to a footnote at the time I did some triage. I look at it now and think it just needs to go. I don't know what the "no include" business is about. Cynwolfe (talk) 17:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

I think we feel the same way about the article. It has its problems, but it isn't extremely terrible, so our efforts are probably better invested in articles that are.

I agree that dubious statements like the above that aren't even relevant to the article topic can just be cut out. --dab (𒁳) 15:32, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Conflation of Germans with Celts

Weirdly enough, the last section on the page discusses Germanic traditions, in spite of their being an unrelated people, leading me to initially think this page might be better titled 'Iron-Age Northern European music' - BUT - then at one point the author even refers to the Sicambri as a Celtic group, which is just wrong. Either the page should be split in two or it should be retitled and terminology used more carefully. - 174.102.104.77 (talk) 07:42, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Well there were Celtic & Germanic tribes that intermixed. They were not mutually exclusive peoples. So no, I would not say that they were unrelated people at all.99.54.188.176 (talk) 20:02, 6 January 2015 (UTC)

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Where can I go to hear ancient Celtic music?

I came to this article to listen to some ancient Celtic music, but I didn’t find any. Of course, we don’t actually have recordings of ancient Celtic music, but we have re-creations, so I was wondering where I could find that on Wikiprojects. 98.97.36.166 (talk) 00:13, 23 August 2023 (UTC)